Floris Kriek | Brouwerij Huyghe

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Appearance: pours out a really lovely and vibrant cherry red colour (funnily enough), not much head to speak of - just a thin cap floating on top.

Aroma: a very strong aroma of artificial cherry - smells of a really nasty saccharin medicine. Not nice.

Taste: once again plenty of saccharin cherry in medicine form. Apparently Krieks are really not my type of beer.

Aftertaste: becomes slightly bitter on the finish, but still the cherry lingers for quite some time.

Mouth feel: medium in body with a moderate amount of fine carbonation.

Overall: between this beer and Timmermans Kriek Lambicus, I think it's pretty safe to say that Kriek is not my preferred style of beer. They both taste and smell like saccharin, medicinal cherry. Nasty. Particularly for over AU$110 for a case of 24 x 330mL. No thanks.

Look: DEEP cherry red - pinkish head which sticks around for a little while.

Smell: Cherries (duh!) with a slightly medicinal tang to it - perhaps comparisons to cough syrup are a bit wide of the mark, but there's definitely a bit of a whiff of antiseptic there.

Taste: I'll be straight - I love cherry beers but my palate tends to prefer the 'sour' end of the spectrum rather than the sickly-sweet 'artificial' cherry flavours. This sits somewhere in between, veering towards the sweet end of the scale. Which is a pity.

Feel: Bit of a lightweight, to be honest - not really helped by the sweetness, which can be a bit overbearing in large quantities.

Overall: Disappointing - give me a properly 'sour' kriek and I'm as happy as you like; this sits uncomfortably between sour and 'artificially sweet'.

Floris Kriek is a brew I've been eyeing off for a while, and since I haven't officially reviewed a kriek beer yet, though I have tried many, I thought it appropriate to review one now. Cherry beers to me have two different slants, the first (and best) of which is sour cherry, and the second being sickly sweet like cough drops. I'm hoping for the sour cherry type but with this being Brouwerij Huyghe, a hit and miss brewer, I'm expecting cough drops.

Poured from a 330ml bottle into a St Feuillien chalice.

A: A perfect cherry red hazy body with a head that was pink before reducing to a thin ring around the edge of the glass.

S: And we have cough drops! Very full on the nose too. It feels like my olfactory senses are being assaulted violently with lashings of cough syrup. This is going to be a cherry-flavoured sugar bomb. Disappointing as it did look promising.

T: The flavour is as expected above with that cherry cough syrup taste. However there is a glimmer of hope with a touch of astringency thrown in to the mix, making it at least semi-dimensional. Though there is clearly too much sugar, this brew could benefit from a longer fermentation which would both bring up the ABV from 3.7% and decrease the saccharine levels.

M: Mid to light bodied with a dense but light carbonation.

D: This really is overbearingly sweet for something that is a mid-strength. If it was 5-6% ABV maybe I could let it off the hook but at this level it is completely overwrought and not really enjoyable for a drink. It also cloys a bit after drinking several sips and leaves that cough syrup after-taste that fills one with dreaded reminisce for a childhood memory of being forced to take cold and flu medicine.

Food match: Stick to desserts, specifically cherry pie with a side of cream.